Reference: Andrew Ballantyne reviews Robert Harbison’s Thirteen Ways: Theoretical investigations in architecture in the TLS (1997).
Thirteen Ways may have been intended as a commentary to a sequence of slides selected for their visual power and thematic relevance. In a lecture, the audience is presented with an image, and held for a moment in suspense as it wonders how this will be linked to the theme, so there are anticipations and resolutions as the talk progresses … Harbison’s prose has the insistent rhythm of a carousel of slides changing from one to the next, two or three times on a page, but producing again and again a dark screen.
Text: This is what art school slide talks were like. Artists were asked to speak to the students but they rarely prepared what to say until standing in front of the projected slides. Each time the screen went dark, both slide-talker and audience shared the sense of expectation. My talks were entirely anecdotal. In fact, they were a ragbag of stories about artists intervening diversely in diverse collection-holding environments. I had no wish to tidy up my anecdotes. Like all art school presentations, they reflected the experimental floundering of a studio practice.
Reference: Alison Wilding’s sculpture Blue-Black falls apart in front of me at a British Art Show.
The separate parts were no longer on display; they had lost their adaptation to the environment of the spectator. Like any serendipitous arrangement of materials on a studio floor, the horizontal disposition made it much harder to understand how, of all the sculptures these bits might become, a small rounded piece of wood and a little dish of hammered metal could come together quite as exquisitely as they had. The collapsed exhibit had restored the improvisatory moment in which a sculptor does not know what it will take for the parts to become a whole. When an attendant reassembled the piece – a task she performed easily – the sculptor’s final arrangement dismissed all thoughts of improvisation. By the time this attendant had returned to her chair, the uncertainty of the studio had been banished by an act of restitution that conjured, as if from nowhere, the finished version of the artwork – now the sculpture was an entirely stable entity that merely needed routine maintenance.
Notes: Chris Dorsett (2011). ‘Things and Theories: the unstable presence of exhibited objects’. In Dudley, S., Barnes, A. J., Binnie, J., Petrov, J., & Walklate, J. (eds) The Thing about Museums: Objects and Experience, Representation and Contestation, London and New York: Routledge.
Reference: In this extract from my article about Julian Rosefeldt’s installation Asylum (Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, 2004) I refer to a short documentary video on Baltic’s website.
In the BALTIC’s video walk-through the darkened gallery and the archivist’s hand-held camera result in a low-grade experience that contrasts starkly with the contemporary artist’s dazzling cinematic installation. Whilst this short video has none of the production values of the artist’s film-making, it is surprising how well the impromptu recording captures the moment when one of the projections cuts out in order to restart. Amidst the flickering screens, an image suddenly disappears in the cavernous space. At this point hesitation prompts a level of disorientation more familiar in cinemas than galleries. When a film ends and the lights go up to reveal the environment in which we have been sitting, there is a momentary puncturing of spectoral engagement. Viewing Asylum involved a similar jolt into bewilderment. Once one screen had gone blank others rapidly followed suit leaving absolutely nothing to respond to until one’s semiotic faculties were able to engage with the gallery interior. Thus the viewer, now deprived of any secure basis for their spectatorship, was left with a sense of ruptured consciousness. The content of the installation disappeared, other gallery visitors looked strangely insentient and distorted, and an overwhelming sense of blankness detached us from our capacity to comprehend. Viewers were, at this point, beyond the reach of Rosefeldt’s imagery but also aware of a type of experience excluded from BALTIC’s sense of black box aesthetics: the darkened room, its concrete floor, taped-up light fittings, and so on – everything, that is, which was not a video projection.
Notes: Chris Dorsett (2016) ‘The pleasure of the holder: media art, museum collections and paper money’, International Journal of Arts and Technology.